Terry Laughlin's Blog, page 26

Why I Count Strokes the Conscious (‘Hard’) Way

Earlier this month, TI Coach (and ‘Head Librarian’ of the TI Swim Academy) Mat Hudson wrote a  blog titled Why Count Strokes?

I urge you to read it — all the way through. It’s packed with invaluable insight and clear, compelling explanation. At the top, Mat enumerates his reasons for counting strokes. My favorites include:

Counting strokes is the first, basic form of objective feedback I can learn and master
It reveals the first critical feature of swimming speed and swimming efficiency.
I can do it  myself
I can immediately connect any technique changes I make to an effect on  stroke count
No batteries required

Halfway down the page, Mat poses the question of whether we should use a ‘device’ to track stroke count. After all there are numerous watches these days that will take care of counting for you.

Counting ‘au naturel’ — in  your head — is harder, as Mat acknowledges: Just because it is hard to do at first, don’t be intimidated by the work you need to do to develop the habit.

I’ve made the same choice.

Actually, there  wasn’t a choice when I started counting–in 1972 as a college senior. No one had suggested I count strokes, but I thought–as long as I could–why not?

The only information to be had about the repeats we did in training came  after I stopped swimming and looked at the pace clock. As we did at least one 800-yard swim in every workout, a times that could mean waiting 9 or more minutes to get feedback. I began counting strokes because I thought it might be better to have some kind of feedback every lap — i.e. every 16 to 18 seconds.

Almost 40 years later I got  a watch which could record stroke count,  length, and rate during a swim. At the push of a button, I could review all that data immediately after a swim. I enjoyed playing with my new toy for a week or two but, after using it no more than 8 or 10 times, I lost interest and went back to counting the hard/conscious way.

Why? For the same reason I’d started counting 40 years earlier. The watch gave a lot more detailed feedback than the pace clock, but still wouldn’t deliver it until after I finished swimming. I want feedback throughout my swim. So I count strokes. Always. In fact, it’s become such a habit, it’s sometimes hard for me to turn off the ‘automatic counter’ in my head.

That’s good. It means that after years of counting, the act of doing so requires so little ‘brainpower’ that I have a lot of free space. For sequencing through internal, external, and visualizing focal points. For noticing subtle changes in my stroke. For tracking my finishing and sendoff  time, while doing more complex forms of interval repeats. Etc.

Here are a few more reasons (of many) why I prefer to count myself:

1) Conscious counting is a way of staying present with my swimming. It acts like a mantra, converting any lap into a moving meditation.

2) Counting consciously – while looking for familiar ‘landmarks’ in the pool – a line across the bottom halfway, or the backstroke flags heading into the wall — provide additional ways of verifying that I’m staying efficient.

3) The mental effort it requires is good for my brain.The website Lumosity.com (and others like it) promise to improve memory and sharpen thinking via ‘brain games.’ I accomplish the same by counting and recalling my SPL–then using that info with either Tempo or Time in doing the ‘math’ of swimming.

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I Don’t Want to Become a Stiff, Sore Old Person

 This is the second guest post by noted writer and blogger Mariah Burton Nelson.  It’s an honor to feature a respected author and thinker like  Mariah. We’re delighted she’s thinking a lot about her swimming now, and making connections between her TI practice and  how she goes about the rest of her day. In  A Splash-Free Life, Mariah wrote that, after focusing on stroking with minimal water disturbance,  she was inspired to avoid  ’messy, noisy, random’  actions outside the pool. Here she turns her focus from behavior to her physical state.

Not for nothing, do we say TI is ‘Swimming that changes your life.” Enjoy!

[PS: Notice the relaxation in Mariah's 12-SPL for 25-yards freestyle lap in the video below.]

I don’t want to become an old person with sore joints.

Is this inevitable?

Maybe. Frankly, I’m already a middle-aged person with sore joints.

But I have a hypothesis: Stiff, sore people get that way by “baking” muscular tension into their (our) bodies.

Whatever we practice, we reinforce. By “practicing” chronic tension, perhaps we create necks, backs, and shoulders that become permanently tight and tired.

Josh Hanagarne, who has Tourette’s, explains in The World’s Strongest Librarian that it’s “exhausting” to experience a continual onslaught of muscular contractions. Maysoon Zayid, a comedian, uses the same word – exhausting – to describe what it’s like to “shake all  the time” due to cerebral palsy.

Might all of us be exhausting ourselves by inadvertently contracting, clenching, and clamping our shoulders, backs, and necks – not just at work and home but in the water, too?

As a Total Immersion student, I’m learning to swim and relax at the same time. (The video below illustrates that attempt.) During the recovery phase, for instance, Terry Laughlin teaches that the leading hand should dangle as it skims above the water.

Now I find myself wondering what might constitute a “recovery phase” on land. Can I achieve what Terry calls “effortless endurance” here, too? When walking, for instance, do I need to marionette my shoulders up toward my ears? When working, must I vice-clamp my jaw?

Not surprisingly, Terry’s way ahead of me.

“Since I started focusing on pinpoint relaxation (relaxing neck muscles to hang head, hand muscles at all times, the ulnar muscle for a ‘suspended’ forearm,) I find I’m much better at being conscious of unintended, unproductive muscular tension at all times, often related to ordinary living stress,” he explains.

I studied Tai Chi in college, and one day my teacher invited an 80-year-old Japanese master to demonstrate. Before he began moving, she said proudly, “Look at his flaccid muscles!”

Flaccidity had never been my goal. But she made a good point: Muscles are for motion. To tense them unnecessarily is to fatigue and even injure them.

This is not an argument against strength training. It’s an argument for conscious, efficient movement, in the water and on land. I don’t know if we can become flexible, pain-free, energetic old people, but I suspect that the actions we take – and don’t take – right now might make all the difference.

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A former Stanford and professional basketball player, Mariah Burton Nelson is the author of six books about female athletes, including We Are All Athletes and The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football. She’s in charge of innovation for ASAE: The Center for Association Leadership.

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Swim Inside-Out

I will pull this quote from my previous essay because I want to elaborate a little more…

As swimmers we need to realize that what happens inside the body is far more important than what we see happening on the outside. The outside of the swimmer is a product of what has occurred on the inside… or lack of what has occurred there.

The folly of my first 13 years of swimming (and a few years of triathlons in there until I got irreparably injured) was that I was continually using my tolerance for pain (my pride and pleasure in it, actually) and hard work in the attempt to drive performance into my body, from the outside in. “I”, or my ‘will-power’, acted upon my body to make it do things I thought it didn’t want to do but needed to in order to get faster.

But this was the great folly. I mistook the pain and stress I felt inside as a lazy body’s resistance to work hard. But what I see now is that my body was actually in agreement with my goal. Instead it was resisting my destructive ways of going about it.

Keep in mind a couple things about injury:

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To view hundreds of articles of coaching advice and answers to swimmer’s questions on training and technique please visit Coach Mat’s Smooth Strokes blog.

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Meditation, Marines, and Mindful Swimming

In the NY Times Magazine piece, Breathing In Vs. Spacing Out writer Dan Hurley describes the importance of balancing two types of thinking for optimal brain health.

Hurley reports that the psychologist Amishi Jha used meditation to train United States Marines for mental resilience in a combat zone. (Are you surprised to learn this? I’m not.)

“We found that as little as 12 minutes of meditation practice a day helped the Marines to keep their attention and working memory — that is, the added ability to pay attention over time — stable,” said Dr. Jha.

In another study, undergraduates who practiced meditation for just 10 minutes a day, for two weeks, improved their percentile scores on the Graduate Record Exam by 16 points. They also significantly increased their ability to maintain and adjust focus.

Pretty powerful stuff for something that takes just 10 to 12 minutes a day.

Think Two Ways

The article suggests one should one should also devote time regularly to creative thinking . . . which is kind of the opposite of meditation.

In meditation you keep your thoughts fixed on one thing. In creative thinking, you let your mind wander.

I’ve never been good at passive meditation, the most common kind. I find it hard, while sitting still, to keep my thoughts fixed

But I find it easy to maintain focus when moderately active. Every lap I swim includes a ‘mantra’ of some kind–a stroke thought, a stroke count, or the beep of a Tempo Trainer. Many times I do all three in combination.

One place I meditate.

Back on land . . . I sometimes do 15 minutes of prone yoga stretches, or standing-balance asanas, within an hour after waking. While doing them I breathe (10 to 12 slow breaths for each stretch) and focus on the muscles or joints being stretched.

The other place I meditate.

Using the yoga visualization of breathing into the area being stretched (though I know the breath actually goes into my lungs, this is a good focus technique) helps keep my thoughts from straying

I do this because, at 62, it helps me feel better physically. But I also do it because I believe it helps me stay on-task as I write things like this blog post . . . part of the several hours each day I allot to creative thinking.

Since creative thinking is practically my full-time occupation, my takeaway from the article is that I will henceforth make the fixed focus of ‘yoga meditation’ as much a part of my morning routine as brewing tea, rather than something I do occasionally.

And I will definitely continue to practice swimming–always–as a moving meditation.

As the Roman poet Juvenal wrote, Mens sana in corpore sano. Sound mind in a strong body.

I wonder if he knew about mindful swimming.

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Over-Thinking?

An excerpt from a recent post addressing the concern that you’ve possibly felt, or someone has accused you of having…

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The goal behind our TI training – our mental training, specifically – is to learn how and where to direct our attention to maintain the highest level of efficient performance and the highest level of enjoyment. The two go hand-in-hand.

When our attention – that agent of thinking – is directed upon the features of the swim that achieve and maintain our desired level of performance, then we should keep it there. It would be foolish to turn it away. When the focus of attention no longer supports our performance we should change where we direct attention. In reality, there is no stop-thinking, there is only change-thinking. There is no thinking-too-much, there is only thinking-in-the-wrong-direction.

In TI we learn all the areas of skill in swimming that need to be attended to, and we learn in what order and in what priority – just as an aircraft pilot would learn how to keep an aircraft flying safely and smoothly to reach the desired destination in all sorts of meteorological conditions. Some areas needs less attention, some need more. Some are harder to master and to maintain than others. At different times in the flight/swim we tune in to different areas. TI teaches us how to pilot our vessel with high efficiency (energy-management) and high enjoyment (mind-management).

We might define over-thinking as the state of keeping attention in a direction that is no longer producing positive results – working on the wrong problem at this moment, when focusing on another one would allow better progress. It is when the thinking is out of order, or off priority with the needs of the moment.

Another way to define over-thinking is when the swimmer is focused in the right direction but using the wrong type of thinking. Let me explain…

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To view hundreds of articles of coaching advice and answers to swimmer’s questions on training and technique please visit Coach Mat’s Smooth Strokes blog.

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The Most Graceful Freestyle Swimming by Shinji Takeuchi

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Coach, Is It Correct?

Here is a common question I hear from swimmers devotedly practicing their drills: How do I know if it is correct? (“It” being any one of many passive positions of a body part or a particular movement pattern.)

The answer to that question depends on what that particular position or movement pattern is intended to accomplish for you…

At first, it is natural for the student to ask me, a person outside herself, to say if she is doing it ‘correctly’. This is one form of external feedback – and frankly, the least effective kind. But we often start here for this is where the dialogue with her own body begins. From experience, reading her body’s cues, I have a good sense of what may be happening inside. So I tell her what I perceive and ask her to look inside her own body and check. For some, this is a strange and unfamiliar thing to do, but it is absolutely necessary for her progress…

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To view hundreds of articles of coaching advice and answers to swimmer’s questions on training and technique please visit Coach Mat’s Smooth Strokes blog.

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The Perfect Stroke

When you read the words, “The Perfect Stroke” what comes to your mind?

When you read the words, “Your Most Perfect Stroke,” what comes to your mind?

Most likely, these two phrases conjured up different images, sensations, and memories for you. If you pictured a swimmer who you believe to have the Perfect Stroke it was likely not yourself that you thought of.

It is also likely that when you are practicing you are keeping someone else’s perfect stroke in mind when you are concentrating on how to improve your own. There is definitely a time and place for using such imagery to inspire and instruct.

Regardless of how uncomfortably aware of the difference there is between the Perfect Stroke and your most perfect stroke, your stroke is what you have to work with right now.

‘Your Most Perfect Stroke’ = the absolute best stroke you’ve ever taken and you are capable of taking right now, if you set yourself up for it.

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To view hundreds of articles of coaching advice and answers to swimmer’s questions on training and technique please visit Coach Mat’s Smooth Strokes blog.

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When To Move On

Here is a few excerpts from my post entitled When To Move On aimed at answering this question:

How do I know when to move on from a certain drill?

A drill is an activity that isolates a certain skill, allowing you to concentrate on it with less demands on your attention and neuro-muscular control. It can isolate that skill by putting you in position to turn off other skills, and by slowing things down so it is easier to focus on little details.
We can use an analogy to understand these. #1 is like spreading the roots on the tree, and #2 is like spreading the branches. By spending time in a drill (or in whole stroke) within our comfortable skill range, we deepen the roots.


It’s not necessarily about finding out when you are ready to ‘move on’ but when you are ready to test and challenge that skill a bit more. To do this you can add some complexity multipliers to your drill:

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Click here to read more of this post…

To view hundreds of articles of coaching advice and answers to swimmer’s questions on training and technique please visit Coach Mat’s Smooth Strokes blog.

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What’s the Deal with Kicking in Freestyle Swimming?

There always seems to be some controversy surrounding kicking in Freestyle swimming. In the TI forums, someone posed a query about kicking and here is how I answered it, with some minor edits:

Some thoughts about kicking that I’ve discovered:

1. There are those who can kick to propel themselves at speed, and those who cannot.

2. There are many reasons why someone cannot propel themselves at speed, some physical, some neurological.

3. The younger you are, the more likely you can develop the correct physical and neurological attributes to enable kicking for speed. Entering swimming when you are older means you will most likely have a harder time developing attributes for speed generation via kicking.

4. Some theorize that bigger feet can propel you faster. I’m not sure this has been conclusively proven that big feet always make you fast via kicking since there are other elements involved besides big feet, but there are definite advantages to being able to have more surface area for moving water.

5. In my experience, poor balance will result in negating any kicking advantage you might obtain. If you’re even gonna have a chance at speed via kicking, you better have your act together in balance. This goes for flutter kicking in SG, or Skate. It also applies to kicking with a board. If you are dragging your body in the water behind the kickboard, you’re gonna have a hard time obtaining speed while kicking behind it.

6. Thus, one bad aspect of kicking with a board is that in order to get your body up, you’re most likely going to have to overextend your back and arch to get your hips and legs up horizontal. This can be VERY bad for your back. To combat this, you could keep your head down in the water but then you have to tip your head up or to the side to take the occasional breath.

7. There is a risk that if you imprint overextending on the kickboard, it can ruin your posture for regular swimming. The majority of the population in today’s society already exhibits overextended backs (ie. “sway”). I do not think it’s a good idea to reinforce already a bad postural aspect.

8. Some physical and neurological attributes:

a. Ankle flexibility seems to be a major element. You must also be able to point your feet and toes and keep them pointed without straining other muscles while swimming (ie. no calf cramps!).

b. Proper movement pattern for kicking, very unlike any other kind of movement pattern on land.

c. Proper mobility and strength in the lower body, from hips to feet.

d. Ability to move legs rapidly enough in that movement pattern from a physical conditioning standpoint. Moving your legs so much requires more oxygen and energy and thus there is some fitness you will have to develop in order to kick for a long time.

e. Timing some of the kicks to the arm stroke to generate power spearing forward. If 2BK, then all of the kicks, 1 each stroke, is timed to the spear.

9. If you are kick challenged, then don’t waste time developing your kick like someone who has been swimming since they were a kid or someone who has mastered the 6BK. Go to the 2BK immediately.

9a. If you are finding that kicking isn’t moving you forward all that fast, then also don’t bother. You will probably find that kicking will use up resources faster than you want, versus getting you more speed.

10. You should also ask yourself why would you want to kick in Freestyle swimming. If you are trying to be the fastest for short course racing, then it may be worthwhile. If you are a triathlete and need to save the legs for the bike and run, then kicking might not be desirable.

11. If you are kick challenged, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t develop a kick. Like it or not, kicking is a valid swimming skill and if someone wants to learn, then by all means go for it.

I was kick challenged but then over the years of working in TI, i could actually start moving myself across the pool with kicking! The things I had to adjust for myself were:

a. If I kicked in Skate, I had to spear much deeper, like 30-40 deg than for regular swimming. This would ensure I had my hips really high and a great horizontal position in the water.

b. I had to metabolically prepare for constant and fast movement of my legs, and at a rate that was higher than I was accustomed to. This rate was much higher than for running. And I had to maintain it while I could not get constant air due to being face down longer than I would for a land activity.

c. I learned that kicking on my back was different than kicking on my stomach. If you kick on your back, you need to also exert kicking force to the back of the leg in addition to kicking forward. This helps bring your hips up. Also, this aspect applies to kicking in Backstroke – the first time I was drilling Backstroke, I could not even move! But then Coach Shinji told me I needed more down kick, or when on my back I needed to kick to the rear of my legs versus only to the front, and that fixed everything.

So it can be trained, and there are ways to train for 6BK that are optimized. The later in life you start swimming, the more time you’re going to spend developing the basic attributes for kicking. I do think it is possible at any age to do so. It’s just that most people are too impatient to work at it and arguably you can swim pretty fast without kicking so much.

CoachDShen is a Total Immersion coach based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more posts at his training blog.

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